Justin Watson

In February of 2015, a coach in East Texas named Andy Evans lost his 18 year old son Scott in a car accident. Evans is one of the great high school coaches in that part of the state. After he lost Scott he could barely function. He kept a sofa in his office, and he has said that he would go in to work and lie down on it. Somebody asked him to come help out at Beckville for one year. He stayed seven. Seven years in a town he had no particular reason to stay in. There was a sixth grader there named J'Koby Williams. Evans took him under his wing, and the boy did not leave him alone with it. Williams hugged him. Not once. Every single day, for years, he found Andy Evans and he hugged him and he told him he loved him. Here is what Evans says about that now. "That kid had a lot to do with saving my life, and that's why he's so special to me." Evans is 60 now. He and Williams still talk all the time, and Williams calls him Paw-Paw. Don Williams of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal is the one who found this and wrote it down. Now understand who that sixth grader turned into. Beckville is a 2A town of about 800 people near the Louisiana line. Williams finished high school there with 6,401 rushing yards and 98 touchdowns, which works out to 12.5 yards every time he carried the ball. He ran for 303 yards and four touchdowns in one playoff game. He scored 32 rushing touchdowns as a senior. He also won three Texas state championships in the 110 meter hurdles, and five state titles overall. He picked Texas Tech over Texas, LSU, Michigan, Baylor, TCU, SMU and Houston. As a freshman he got his first start in the Liberty Bowl and ran for 123 yards. Last season he went for 787 yards, caught 30 passes, took a kickoff 99 yards against Oklahoma State and finished as a finalist for the award that goes to the most versatile player in college football. He is not the whole offense. He has 538 yards this season and he splits carries, and Texas Tech is 6 and 0 because they spent an enormous amount of money rebuilding the defense, not because of him. But he is on the field, at number eight in the country, playing at Cincinnati this weekend. And here is the part worth sitting with. Andy Evans did not get his son back. Nothing fixes that. What happened instead is that his older son Jaxon and a group of junior high kids in Beckville, Texas kept showing up, and one of them hugged him every day for years until the man could stand up again. That kid carries the ball for the number eight team in the country.